What's the lifetime of a good movie?

Cafe Society
1

In Enterprise they have old movie night where they movies like “Bride of Frankenstein” - yet I wonder how much of a stretch this is (isn’t Enterprise in ~2150?).

“It’s a Wonderful Life” (1946) is playing tonight for the millionth time, and this movie has consistantly been the Christmas movie for decades. How much longer will this go on? I’ve only seen “It’s a Wonderful Life” and other old movies from the 50s-60s because my father had me watch them with him as a child. I doubt that I will pass on any of these movies to my kids, but I might share movies from when I grew up in the 80s, and definitely the 90s/00s with them. Will this trend occur worldwide, causing the death of movies from half a century ago?

Are there any movies from the 10s, 20s, or 30s that are still watched today? How long can we expect good movies like Lord of the Rings to last?

2

This is a great question.

Two fairly old movies that I think are still seen quite a bit are The Wizard of Oz and Gone with the Wind, both from 1939. I can’t think of too many movies older than that that are routinely watched by people other than film geeks.

For perspective think of the original Star Wars trilogy. When the first one (Ep. IV) came out the special effects knocked everyone’s socks off but now the original release looks kind of hokey, and the light saber battle doesn’t compare to what came later.
How are that movie and the next two going to hold up 20 or 30 years from now? Not too well I think, especially since the dialogue and acting weren’t really anything special.

3

It’s a good question, but I’m not sure we can really answer it, at least not in the terms of movies showing up on Enterprise as mentioned in the OP.

See, the film industry, such as it is, is barely a hundred years old. Nickolodeons and flickers were an early-20th-century innovation that were considered nothing more than a passing distraction for the masses by cultural mavens; it wasn’t until Griffith and Chaplin and other innovators came along that the movie started being taken with anything resembling seriousness.

So if you date the advent of what we consider memorable filmmaking not from the technological work of Edison and the Lumieres before 1910 but rather a few years later, consider that some people are still alive from that period. Given the grand sweep of history, cinema is still in its infancy, having grown up along with the technological and information revolutions.

Thus I’m not sure anyone can reasonably predict what might happen over the next hundred years. Perhaps some totally unexpected invention may revolutionize presentational storytelling, like high-fidelity three-dimensional holographic projection or VR-style brain taps or something nobody has thought of yet. If that happens, our “flat” movies will become museum pieces for specialists the same way silent movies have (unfairly) become today: we know about them, but hardly anybody bothers with them outside the circles of hard-core cognoscenti.

Of course, you can say that about any of our transient art forms nowadays, not just movies. In a hundred years, will I Love Lucy and The Dick Van Dyke Show still be available on channel 5387? Probably, if you go searching. How about Seinfeld or E/R? Maybe. Murder She Wrote? Matlock? Fresh Prince of Bel Air? The Rockford Files? Who knows?

And in a hundred years, people will probably still be listening to Frank Sinatra. How about Pearl Jam?

So, yeah, it’s a good question, but I think it’s wide open to speculation, more so than is immediately apparent.

4

With the advent of digital technology, and the copying of everything; I believe there is a very good chance that not only will “Citizen Kane” survive, but so will “I was a teenage Werewolf.”
And everthing in-between.

5

Are you joking? There are thousands of great movies from the first 50 years of cinema that are miles better than 95% of what’s released today, including LOTR. Switch to Turner Classic Movies or American Movie Classics almost any night to see some of them.

Just because it’s in black and white, or is silent, doesn’t mean it’s dull or dated or uninteresting. Douglas Fairbank’s The Mark of Zorro (1920) is IMO the best action film ever made, and he did it all himself with no stuntmen or digital special effects. von Stroheim’s Greed, a silent from 1924, is an incredibly powerful drama. If you haven’t seen a Marx Brothers film you haven’t laughed as hard you are capable of laughing. You don’t have to be a movie geek to seek out and enjoy these old classics. All you have to be is someone who wants to be entertained.

The good news is that with the advent of digital technology and home video, virtually every piece of film or TV that hasn’t already been lost completely will be saved and made available in multiple media.

In short, the answer to the OP is YES! Many, many of them. Good stories are timeless. And this is undoubtedly the point that the producers of Enterprise are trying to make. And maybe acquaint some of you young kids with their favorite classics.

BTW, 50 years from now, LOTR may be seen as dated, overblown, or just boring. Only time can determine what is a classic.

6

I hope not! I’ve got to have at least one trilogy to hold onto for the next few decades to tell the kids about, I’m just a tad young (26) to claim Star Wars since I really didn’t see/understand it until the late 80s…All I’ve got in my span is The Matrix (but whether or not it will stand up the test of time is debatable) and LOTR.

The LOTR movies seem to be loved by everyone I know except my father for some unknown reason, even though he owns 2 “Chicago” DVDs and has seen it 8 times in the theatre and dozens at home. This is the same guy that forced me to watch old movies like “The Enemy Below”, “Andromeda Strain”, “It”, “Them”, and “Creature from the Black Lagoon” and expects us young kids with 15 second attention spans to enjoy them! Even movies like “The Graduate” are almost too outdated for my generation I believe. And “Gone With the Wind” - I’ll guess 90% of people under 25 in the U.S. haven’t seen or heard of this movie.

But this of course might be the problem with “movie life”, the attention span has dropped to nothing nowadays, and the old movies - while great stories - are hard to get into. I hope LOTR stands the test of time, because it is a wonderful adaption of an amazing story.

7

I agree with Commasense. I have a collection of silent movies, and the timing and the skills of the actors from that time surpass what you see these days- where visual effects seem to be everything.

See Greed. See The Big Parade. And see Metropolis.

But even the question is a little strange. Is the Mona Lisa a lesser work of art because of its age?

8

Hundreds, and until we wipe ourselves out.

Good movies are good forever.

9

I recently showed Charlie Chaplin’s THE GOLD RUSH (1925) to an audience, and it got laugh-out-loud reactions. So, that’s roughly 80 years.

10

The question is valid because movies, as a technology, is evolving and changing at a pace much faster than music, art, or literature. You need to know a little history, or do some serious literary analyisis, to know that Shakespeare wrote The Tempest after Romeo and Juliet, but it’s obvious to any fool that The Phantom Menace was made subsequent to The Empire Strikes Back. And, while the original trinity was better by most measures, the special effects aren’t dating too well. Imagine how crappy they’ll look in 2150!

A good 90% or so of the creative output, in any art, not just film, is justly forgotten (Dude Where’s my Car may utterly vansih by 2060). Other works will become arcane, and while known and watched by scholars and film buffs, becomes too dated and even embarassing by contemporary standards (Birth of a Nation anyone?).

I like movies. In my lifetime, I’ve seen two feature-length silent films (Metropolis and a craptastic version of Nosferatu with a goth-rock soundtrack). I’ve found it hard to get my hands on any others. I know I could if I looked, but I’m not that serious.

We’ve all seen LOTR and SW, but how many have seen the sci-fi serials that inspired Lucas in the first place?

I’d also argue that digital media means film is much more fleeting than literature or art. If someone forgets to update the copyduring the next technology change, the work could be lost forever. We can always read.

11

We were at a Christmas party last night, and another couple had brought their seven-year old daughter, who soon became bored since she was the only kid in a bunch of grown ups. Our host was looking for a way to entertain the litttle girl. He had no cartoons, no Disney videos or other children’s entertainment, but he did have a video of Buster Keaton’s Sherlock Jr. (1923). He popped the tape into the player and sat the skeptical little girl down in front of the TV. “Watch this - you’ll love it!”

About ten minutes later I looked in on the girl, who was howling with laughter at some of Keaton’s incredible physical comedy. We watched the rest of the movie together, and we had a grand time. The seven-year old didn’t need any of the plot (which alternates between a film projectionist and his fantansy life as the world’s greatest detective), and for the next half hour we laughed out loud together.

After the movie was over, I explained that most of what she saw on the screen actually happened - that the stunts were done by Keaton in real life. There’s one sequence where Keaton ride a motorcycle while sitting on the handlebars, through various hazrds. When I told her these scenes were done in real life and fimed, the little girl said, “You mean it’s not like Harry Potter?” Those things really happened?"

So to answer the OP, the lifetime of a great movie is as least 80 years, judging by the way the little girl was delighted and amazed by Buster Keaton!

12

So far as Joe and Jane Average are concerned, pretty much everything is forgotten after three or four generations. If you look back a century to 1903, how much of that era’s culture is still remembered by the average person today? Not a lot.

Average people aren’t really the ultimate custodians of culture, though. It’s the atypical people who preserve this stuff, the folks who combine a pack-rat mentality with an obsessive-compulsive attention to detail. Call 'em the crazed collectors or the rabid fans (or, if they have degrees, the serious scholars :wink: ) These are the folks who rescue the past from the dumpster where the average folks toss it every time they clean out their attics.

So will It’s A Wonderful Life still be around a century from now? Almost certainly: enough cultural pack-rats have it squirreled away that it’s unlikely to perish from the face of the earth.

Will Joe and Jane Average of 2103 watch it every year? Almost certainly not: it has far too many era specific references to things like the Great Depression and World War II and steamer trunks and telegrams. And it’s in black and white, and low-fi, and the people all dress and talk “strangely,” etc. etc. Joe and Jane will probably watch some Xmas classic from the mid-to-late 21st century instead.

Mind you, it’s possible that a remake of IAWL could still be a hit a century from now. Stories tend to survive the ages in retellings, not in their pure, unaltered original versions. Just compare the number of people who know A Christmas Carol from its innumerable stage, movie, and TV productions to the number of people who know it from actually reading the book, for example.

13

That’s ridiculous. 10% is more like it

14

I agree, it’s very difficult not to hear of famous movies.

15

I must disagree. The ignorence of most younger people when it comes to film history is alarming. Whenever I talk about something like, say, the Marx Brothers or Citizen Kane I’m answered with a “who?” or a “what?” These are extremely famous actors/movies which are still watched and enjoyed by many today, but modern audiences just write them off due to being black and white/silent/etc.

Hell, most teens even consider films from the 90s old. They’d just prefer to go to ther cinema and watch the 1000th shitty Matrix film. They deserve what they get.

16

Well call the fire department because you haven’t grasped the real tragedy: younger people are ignorant about damn-near everything.

When they get into their twenties, with or without a university education, they’ll be more receptive to concepts beyond the immediate and obvious and at that point might start developing interest in film, politics, art and history. They don’t deserve your scorn in the meantime.

Take a chill pill, daddy-o.

17

What’s really bad is the shocking lack of sodium taught in our public schools today!

18

Yeah, but if you’d said “Rosebud,” someone would probably have gotten the reference. If you said, “Frankly, Scarlett, I don’t give a damn,” someone would have gotten the reference. Even if they haven’t necessarily seen the classics, they’ve been exposed to them. They come up in other movies, tv shows like The Simpsons, books, all kinds of things. As long as those references are still being made, people are going to get curious, and they’re going to want to know what’s being referenced and why.

19

I imagine 2001: A Space Odyssey will be sticking around for some time. Unlike Star Wars, the effects still look comparable today and the plot was intriguing.